Tonight the Streets Are Ours

Arden’s father thought Lindsey was a troublemaker, which was true from an adult perspective, but irrelevant to how good a friend or person she was. He thought she was unambitious, which was decidedly not true; it’s just that her ambitions were not the sort that Arden’s father cared about. And though he would never come out and say this, and would deny it to the death if Arden had asked him point-blank, he didn’t like that Lindsey was gay. Whenever he was around and Lindsey was over, he would watch her like a hawk, as if concerned that she was going to suddenly try to stick her tongue in his daughter’s mouth.

But at least Arden’s parents had never given a damn whether or not Lindsey knocked on their door before she came in.

“Hello!” Mrs. Matson called from the kitchen.

Arden took this as her permission to enter. All three Matsons were sitting at the kitchen table, eating oatmeal. Lindsey perked up considerably when she saw Arden. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “It’s like the middle of the night for you.”

“Roman needed a ride to basketball.” Arden chose not to mention the bit where their father had forgotten about his son’s game, because that was just guaranteeing that Lindsey’s parents would gossip about and judge her dad as soon as she left the room. They didn’t understand that ever since Arden’s mom had left, her father was suffering, he was alone, he was lost, and he was focusing all his attention on the one part of his life where he felt like he was in control.

“Want to come to the game with me?” Arden asked Lindsey. If Lindsey came, then maybe this youth sports game would not be as tremendously boring as it was shaping up to be.

“Sorry, Arden, we have church this morning,” said Mr. Matson.

“It’s Sunday,” Mrs. Matson added, her tone implying that the equivalence of Sunday and church should be obvious to anyone who wasn’t a complete heathen.

Arden’s family had never been particularly religious. According to Lindsey, her parents used to be the same—until Mr. Matson got sick, a decade ago. To Arden this seemed backward. Wouldn’t it be more logical to believe in God until you got cancer? But as far as Lindsey’s dad was concerned, it was his newfound faith that had helped him pull through, and he’d been cancer-free for seven years now.

“I can stop by afterward,” Lindsey volunteered. “The game’s at Roman’s school, right? How long will it go for?”

“Like a hundred hours,” Arden guessed.

“Cool. See you there. Go team. Wait, what’s his team’s name again?”

“The Parakeets.” Arden shrugged.

“Go Parakeets. Tweet, tweet, tweet.”

“Can I borrow my car key?” Arden asked.

“Sure.” Lindsey ran upstairs to get it, her feet pounding the steps. Her parents watched this transaction with baffled expressions. There was a lot about having Lindsey as their daughter that they did not seem to understand.

Arden grabbed her key and headed back to the car. She unlocked the door for her shivering brother. “My muscles are going to seize up,” he told her once he was buckled in and the car was on. “Can’t you turn up the heat?”

“The heater’s working as hard as it can, kiddo. If you’re not satisfied, you are totally welcome to get out and walk,” Arden said, driving down their quiet street.

Roman considered this and said nothing more on the matter.

Arden watched early-morning Cumberland pass by her windshield. It was a quaint little city with lots of history, old houses that sold for cheap, and attractive church steeples that dotted the hillside. In the 1700s a vaguely important fort had been here, and in the 1800s Cumberland was a shipping junction and home to industry, facts which brought the city great pride and were commemorated by many plaques around town.

But if you were on a tour to see the Important Sites of Cumberland—a tour that every middle school student in the town had done, and almost nobody else—you would quickly realize that Cumberland’s most vibrant years were well behind it. Maybe that’s part of what attracted Arden’s parents here in the first place, that it seemed uneventful. Eighteen years ago, they’d bought a pretty brick house and two gently used cars, and Arden’s mom planted a garden out front, and it seemed like the perfect place to raise a family.